Meeting an elder statesmen of gaming is strange. An art form's old guard should have a wizened, gnomic quality, like theatre's Peter Brook. But games are so new that even the creators of Pong are younger than my parents. When I encounter Ken Levine, the creator of Bioshock, hours after accepting his lifetime achievement award at the Golden Joystick awards, I am struck by his ram-like solidity. He's a broad, youthful figure, barely entering middle age. And his energy and passion are palpable.

"You ever go to Disney World?" he fires, having learnt of my interest in games. Before I can mull on which Disney park I might have visited as a child, he interjects. "Go again. Because the thing that's most like what we do, is Pirates of the Caribbean." I frown, struggling with the comparison, picturing Johnny Depp. He helps me out. "The ride."

The films were based on a Disney theme park experience, not the other way around. And it is that rollercoaster entertainment, a world and a journey, but one where you can look wherever you like, that Levine believes holds the key to great game-making. "You look at a guy like Walt Disney. He said, 'I am going to create an experience. How do I lure people into a mood. How do I get their attention? How do I get them to feel?' You feel as different in Frontierland as you do in the Haunted Mansion. He [Disney] was excellent at doing that without being able to fully control an audience's attention."

Levine's award seems to have sparked something in him, rather than dimmed it. When I ask about his plans, he is forthcoming. He describes frustration that gaming is a "one and done experience". The true next stage, he says, is to open it to more narrative possibility; greater in-game choice and consequence, so that you want to go on the ride again and again. And it's his childhood that inspires him. "When I was a kid I had this Death Star playset. It was very specific. It was moulded in plastic and it had stickers all over. And then I had my Lego bricks. And the Death Star playset was good because it was really detailed but that was all it did: be the Death Star. The Lego didn't look quite as good but you could make anything out of it."

Games use heuristics to offer choices and solutions during play. A heuristic is like an equation. Levine uses the example of Elizabeth providing the player with ammo in Bioshock Infinite, (the oft-triggered, "Booker, Catch!"). This heuristic works out how much ammo you have, what level of threat you are under and from a relatively simple set of pre-programmed rules, "decides" whether or not to have Elizabeth throw you more ammo. This is a present tense event, rather than a built-in narrative certainty. It's based on your actions, not what the developer permanently plotted. Levine leans forward: "So what if you were to take that concept and expand upon it hugely?"

He wants to build a game out of a huge numbers of such "Lego bricks" and a multiplicity of ways to fit them together. He wonders if there could be huge amounts of micro-content, rules that interact and fire off alternative consequences that apply to characters or lines or story rather than just ammo. Gaming has tried to embrace some of this already, but on a narrower scale. Levine imagines something more ambitious and ever-changing. More, possibly, like life. When he tests what one of his developers has been working on, he takes the controller and immediately turns the avatar round and starts going the other way. He wants to play his own game, not the one the developer has decided he should play. "I try to be the asshole," he jokes.

Levine doesn't come across as an asshole. He is a big, soulful thinker but with an ambitious, driving focus.

Thinking about the possibility of this next project, he becomes momentarily profound: "Inertia is an incredibly powerful force. It makes us think we have a life, versus a continuum of choices.

"We always think of the road not taken, of something in the past. 'Wow, what would have happened if I married so and so, or took that job in San Diego…' But you rarely think that each and every second that goes by is one of those moments. Like this second that just happened. And that one. And the one that's going to happen in a second." Potentially, each of these seconds could alter a game in a profound way. Just as they can in life. The easiest thing for us to imagine is that our lives, and the story we are playing, are pre-designed, solid. But neither gaming nor life has to be like that. In both, we can alter and decide in a way that is surprising, ultimately freeing.

So why would his new work be different from a plate-spinning simulation like the Sims? Well, it might not necessarily. Except this would still be authored, it would still tell a story. It would end. And actually, that makes it more true to life, not less.

The well-known myth about Disney is that he was cryogenically frozen. This is untrue. He was cremated and his ashes interred in Glendale, California. Life ends. Stories end. It's just that during them, we might have an almost impossible spectrum of choice, if the imagination were there. It isn't surprising that a game-maker like Levine would be considering this as he receives an uncomfortably final lifetime achievement award. Disney may be gone. But his world lives on. The same will be true for Levine.